Alone against them all: Alex Gough vs Germany’s predominance
Altenberg (pps) Bernhard Glass won gold in the men’s singles at the 1980 Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid. Later on, the now 54-year-old worked as coach at the training centre in Oberhof. He was instrumental in the successes of Silke Kraushaar, who became Olympic Champion in Nagano in 1998, and of Tatjana Huefner, who won gold at the 2010 Games in Vancouver. After the end of his service in the German Federal Armed Forces Glass started working as part of the Canadian team of coaches in the 2010-2011 season. He is taking care of the project which could be bluntly characterized by “alone against them all” - the battle of Canadian Alex Gough against the predominance of Germany’s women lugers.
The 24-year-old World bronze medalist, protégé of Canadian head coach Wolfgang Staudinger, already inflicted two defeats on Germany’s women who are usually pampered by success. On February 12, 2011, Gough ended Germany’s winning series of 105 consecutive victories in the women’s singles of the Viessmann Luge World Cup. And on December 17, 2011 she again made it to the top of the rostrum in front of a home-crowd in Calgary.
In the ongoing duel between Germany’s Olympic and three-time World Champion Tatjana Huefner and three-time World silver and Olympic bronze medalist Natalie Geisenberger, Gough is the third of the gang who will probably make the podium in the women’s singles in Altenberg on February 12, 2012 (1st run at 09:40 hrs / 2nd run at 11:30 hrs CET). Gough’s sled was built by Glass and it already gave proof of its efficiency and degree of performance in Calgary. The Canadian team did not compete at the World Cup in St. Moritz, preferring to do some practice runs in Altenberg to even better prepare for the upcoming season’s highlight.
Apart from Gough and the two top favorites Huefner and Geisenberger the following sliders might have the odd chance to achieve a podium finish: local hero Anke Wischnewski, who celebrated her so far only Viessmann Luge World Cup victory in Altenberg, and 2010 European runner-up Corinna Martini, who won her first World Cup in Winterberg in January. European Champion Tatiana Ivanova of Russia is handicapped by a broken middle finger. U.S. slider Erin Hamlin hopes to score a similar coup as the one at the 2009 Worlds in Lake Placid, when, surprisingly, she became the first female U.S. luger to take the World Championship title in front of a home-crowd.
